Severity and suggestions

Every issue a check finds has a severity: critical, warning or info. The severity decides how the check shows up, whether an incident opens, and which alerts go out. A few issues are suggestions instead, which never alert.

Critical

Something is broken now and is likely costing you traffic or revenue. For example, Search engines blocked: robots.txt tells every crawler, or Googlebot or Bingbot, not to crawl any page, so the site can drop out of search results.

Other critical issues include a site that’s down, a sitemap that’s missing or empty, a page newly set to noindex and an expired certificate. A critical issue opens an incident, and it sends alerts at every alert level.

Warning

Worth a look soon, but not broken yet. For example, Slow responses: the page took longer than your limit to answer, on as many checks in a row as your threshold. A missing page title, a removed Sitemap: line in robots.txt and a news sitemap with articles too old for Google News are warnings too.

A warning opens an incident. It sends alerts on Warnings and critical and Everything.

Some issues can be either, depending on how bad they are:

• Fewer URLs in the sitemap is a warning when the URL count drops by more than your threshold (30% to start with), and critical past twice that.
• Certificate expiring is a warning when fewer than 21 days are left and critical under 7, to start with. You can change both limits in the check’s Settings.
• A robots.txt that answers with a server error or 429 is critical, because Google treats it as blocking the whole site. Other failures, like a timeout, are warnings.

When an open incident’s issue becomes more serious, the incident gets worse with it and sends a “Got worse” alert.

Info

A note about something that changed, with nothing broken by it. For example, robots.txt changed: the file is different from the last check, and the diff shows which lines moved. A stale sitemap and a changed page title are info too.

A check whose worst issue is info still counts as healthy. Info issues open an incident, so you have a record of the change, but they only send alerts on Everything. A robots.txt or ads.txt change is handled differently when the same check also finds a warning or critical problem: the change is attached to that problem’s incident as evidence instead of opening one of its own.

Suggestions

A suggestion is something worth tidying that breaks nothing. It shows on the check with a Suggestion badge, but it never opens an incident or sends an alert, and the check still passes.

Today there are 2:

• Index listed inside an index: A sitemap index lists another index, which Google skips there. Nothing is lost if the inner index is also in robots.txt or Search Console. Shown on the check, with no incident or alert.
• More redirects than needed: One of those addresses takes two or more redirects to reach the homepage where one would do. Shown on the check, with no incident or alert.

Which alerts go out

Your account’s alert level decides which severities send alerts:

• Critical only: critical issues only.
• Warnings and critical: warnings and critical issues. A new account starts here.
• Everything: every issue, info included, such as each change to robots.txt or ads.txt.

A site can have its own level, or have its alerts turned off, without changing the rest of the account. A muted incident sends nothing until it’s resolved. The resolved alert follows the most serious severity the incident reached, so “fixed” goes wherever “broken” went. See Alert level and per-site alerts.